EVENTS

News FLASH!!!11!!: Bombs Are Designed To “Kill”!11!!1!!

The crack team of gumshoes at ABC News has scooped its competitors in obtaining a shocking new piece of information revealing that the Boston Marathon bomber “wanted to kill as many people as possible”.

Comments

You have seriously never seen or thought of a weapon made to scare people, or maim them? Reminds me of a bullet my sister once showed me that had been pulled out of a man’s arm. Small caliber, round nose, full metal jacket… but instead of the usual copper, the jacket was a silvery metal, perhaps nickel. The velocity was low enough that the bullet lodged shallow in the man’s muscle, unable to penetrate even halfway through his arm. So, what this says to me is that the shooter didn’t actually care about killing. The low caliber, low velocity bullet would require very good shot placement or a lot of luck to hit anything that would have killed the victim, but the guns that fire these rounds are almost exclusively the highly-concealable pocket pistols that sacrifice barrel length and magazine size to fit in the eponymous pocket. Considering the silver jacket material and the circumstances surrounding the shooting, it is most likely that the shooter cared more about scaring people or maintaining appearances than actually killing anybody.
The same type of analysis can be, and is, done in the case of bombs. The devices in Boston were of the type designed to spray shrapnel into a crowd, a time-tested design going back hundreds of years. Less lethal options: a jar of black powder without shrapnel, a small block of high-explosive, a shaped charge, a container of petrol with a small bursting charge, a bundle of dowels with the word “bomb” affixed, or a light-up viral advertisement. Most of these would cause just as much fear with many fewer, or no casualties.

The land mine is actually meant to grievously wound a soldier in order to force rescue attempts in order to expose rescuers to sniper fire or more land mines. Bombs aren’t always meant to kill, just do as much harm as possible, Including exposing people to future harm.